I just can't possibly have the time.

Additionally, some of the problems are purely intractable, despite anyone saying any different. Further problems are social rather than technical.

I need a chat that works on all my devices, delivers messages to all my devices, keeps track of mentions (again, across all devices), has searchable history (yep, everywhere). Bouncers speak IRC in both directions when that makes absolutely no sense. It'd be like having a mail server speak SMTP instead of IMAP, no way to pull, only to get pushed at.

Even something like IRCCloud where they have their own protocol which is actually purpose-built, can't change fundamentals of how the protocol is and gets used in practice.

Presence is simply unsolved, and pretty valuable for obvious reasons -- so I can decide how and if to contact someone. To try to discern this on IRC I have to keep in mind, for every contact, do they use whois status, do they send away messages, do they use an away nick, or more probably none of the above.

Nicks being mutable but also used for addressing messages is beyond insanity. Sure, let someone decide to be "princess sparkles" for a day or whatever, but I NEVER want to have to figure out who is who in order to be able to open a query window, don't want an existing query window to stop working because they changed their nick for a joke in some channel I'm not in, I never want to split logs of messages with people based on whether they were john or john|break... etc.

Regardless of MY technical competency or capacity for burning time, I will still need non-technical project-helper person to be able to spend an afternoon to create a handful of Trello boards and channels, and make those boards' changes push to their respective channels.

And even though I myself can suck it up and jump those hurdles, I'll never get a majority of my friends or colleagues to do so. Never in a million years. And that alone matters more than any other complaint because as a chat platform, it's the network, stupid.